One type of device for playing back image content such as movies and dramas is a DVD player. Navigation commands constituting a relatively simple control language are used to control video image playback on a DVD player. In addition, Java virtual machines are used to enable the viewing of complex content with high interactivity on Blu-ray disc (BD) players, which have recently started to come into widespread use (see Patent Reference 1, for example).
The playback data on a DVD include video image data, audio data, graphic data, and video control data, which are combined into a single file. On a DVD player, when playback is stopped (interrupted or suspended) and then restarted (resumed), after a wait of a few seconds, the playback is resumed from the position at which it was stopped. In this case, since the video image data, audio data, and other data required for playback are all combined into a single file, the playback can be resumed from the stopping position by re-reading a management information file with a small data size from the optical disc, and thus the wait time for playback resumption is short.
In playback of content using a Java application (Java-virtual-machine-based content) on a Blu-ray disc (BD), however, when playback is stopped and then resumed, the playback operation must be performed from the initial state in which the BD was loaded into the video image information playback device, and the Java application running on the virtual machine must be restarted, so it takes several tens of seconds or several minutes for playback to resume from the previous stopping position. To avoid this, one conceivable method of reducing the time to the resumption of playback is to treat content using a Java application as if it were content not using a Java application.